Friday 23 August 2013 11.17 EDT
First published on Friday 23 August 2013 11.17 EDT

Amateur mycologist Daniel Butler went out this week to look for mushrooms on the Welsh border near Rhayader. In a few hours before breakfast, he and three friends picked 20 kilos of porcini, or cepes. They could equally have returned with sackfuls of blackberries and rosy apples, or the delicious tiny winberries found this month in profusion on the heather moorlands.

After one of the wettest winters and coldest springs on record, the countryside is now groaning with one of the most abundant wild harvests seen in years. Cherries and plums, rowans, dewberries, crab apples and many other fruit are ripening fast, say naturalists, who say they are surprised by the rapid turnaround in nature's fortunes.

Elderflowers in full bloom. Photograph: Alamy

"This could be [poet] John Keats' 'season of mellow fruitfulness'. We have had six years of vile summers. This is the first decent one since 2006. We had the coldest spring in a generation, so a lot of things were destined to fruit late. But the last day of May through to 10 June were really sunny so a lot of autumn fruit and seeding trees flowered then. It could be a definitive year for blackberries. I am talking bucketloads of them if we have some decent September sunshine", said Matthew Oates, a naturalist with the National Trust.

Seasonal food gathering used to be widely practiced in late summer with thousands of families heading out on country lanes and canalsides to pick blackberries, "wildings" (wild apples) and other fruits to supplement meagre diets. But even though 500,000 people in Britain reportedly resort to foodbanks today, surprisingly few take advantage of the free food on offer.

"It is nearly always picked for fun rather than necessity, and much of what is collected now ends up in fancy restaurants or sold as "local food" for a lot of money. But anyone can go out there and collect. The harvest is prolific this year", said James Alsop, a commercial gatherer of mushrooms and wild fruit in Scotland.

Professional forager Robin Harford, who teaches wild food collecting, says he is dining this month on a "super-abundance" of wild vegetables like samphire, nettles and dandelions, as well as fruits galore. "This is a blooming good year. I am gorging on punnets of wild cherries, the blackberries are huge, everything is really sweet and lush this year. Who needs a supermarket when you have a year like this?", he says.

He and other naturalists encourage people to collect in moderation what are shaping to be bumper crops of winberries, wild raspberries, plums, elderberries, and, especially, apples. Last week the Royal Horticultural society in Wisley said the icy spring and the hot summer had made for a "near perfect" apple harvest, with the weather conditions mimicking that of central Asia where they were first developed.

"There's a lot of fruit about this year, especially perry pears which are sometimes really hard to get", says Worcester cider maker Allan Hogan. "Last year was atrocious, because the pollinating insects just didn't want to come out."

Collecting free, wild food became a way of life in World War One when submarine blockades prevented food from being brought into Britain. "Making jams and preserves then was necessary. Between 1940 and 1945, over 5,300 tons of fruit was preserved; that is nearly 12 million pounds of fruit that might otherwise have been wasted, provided food for the nation", said a spokeswoman for the Women's Institute.

Winberries harvested on the Welsh hills. Photograph: Jenny Bates

The tradition of preserving may be returning in these days of austerity, says a spokeswoman for Kilner Jars which reports rising sales. "There's a definite and growing group of consumers out there who want to make their own produce. There's a real pride in it, but also a practical bent too".

But some professional gatherers say people are stripping areas of wild fruit and mushrooms to provide London restaurants, which will pay up to £50 a kilo for some mushrooms and other foods.

"Gangs are going into places like Epping and Ashdown forests. They employ a mycologist [mushroom expert] and strip every fungus in sight. Everything not declared edible is then just chucked. It needs more governance", said Nick Weston, who calls himself a "hunter gatherer" and runs a foraging school in Sussex.

"This season is looking like a bumper year for the fruits and seeds of many trees and shrubs. It really will be a strong year for our harvest and wildlife", said Matthew Parratt, a scientist at the Forestry Commission's Forest Research agency.

But if the humans don't get the free food this year, then the birds surely will, says Kate Lewthwaite of the Woodland Trust. "Wildlife is certain to benefit from a bumper crop. After some very leans years, it looks like fruit-eating birds and mammals will at last be able to enjoy an autumn feast."